May 17, 2016
Today is Bench’s last day of work before he starts his
journey back to the States tomorrow, so today is the day to accomplish the
maximum work possible. The team has talked about finding a balance between
focusing our last days on producing machines or on teaching others to build
machines. We decided that the old proverb stands true for us today: give a man
a fish, feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime. The
balance we found for our project is to build machines and have the workers at
ITTU build them with us. By the end of the day, we hope to collectively finish
last week’s two Graters, plus an additional new Grater.
Yesterday the Tech Subteam discovered that ITTU has the very
machines we depend on to build our Graters. We have been hiring out tasks to
other businesses that have those machines; now that we know that we have the
ability to do these tasks, we can internalize most of the production process.
This is GREAT news!
----
After I wrote the above comments, the electricity cut out
and did not return until 5pm. This absolutely changed our plans for the day
since we rely heavily on power tools to build our machines. This is also the
reason why the blog posts are late.
As soon as the power went out, we reformed and began working
on anything that did not require electricity. We aligned and prepped machines
so that as soon as the power returned, we would have everything ready to cut,
weld, and assemble. The day actually resulted in being incredibly productive
since we accomplished enough work to have 5 Graters completed as soon as we had
our power tools. We were able to accomplish so much because the workers at ITTU
all became involved in the process. This means that we accomplished both our
goals with a perfect balance: we built machines and transferred knowledge!
We called it a night early with the intent of coming to the
shop earlier than normal tomorrow and finish the machines with our power tools.
What an oddly productive day!
May 18, 2016
This morning we left Bench at the airport---half of our Tech
Subteam is now gone! We will miss everything that he contributed to this team:
knowledge, hard work, kindness, and friendship. We look forward to seeing him
as soon as possible!
 |
| Bench's Goodbye Hug! |
When we arrived to the shop early this morning, we
IMMEDIATELY got to work since we had no idea for how long we would have power.
We were in the middle of welding the machines when the power cut out in the
late morning. This time, we had nothing left to prepare while waiting for the
electricity to come back, so we bought a generator and brought it to the shop.
Unfortunately, the generator didn’t work! Just as we were trying to problem
solve the generator, the power came back! We all very clearly understood that
we needed to work as efficiently as possible to finish the machines on this
last day. We worked well past normal work hours and by the end of the day, we
had two finished graters ready to sell and three graters in their last phases of
assembly. We will take the two finished graters to the villages tomorrow and
sell them to the two women on the top of our list. We will also visit the women
who are scheduled to receive their machines in the coming weeks.
 |
| Figuring out what to do without power |
 |
| Trying to fix the generator |
 |
| We worked into the night to finish our machines |
By the time we got back to our Guest House, we were all
exhausted! We still needed to pack our personal bags since this is our last night
in Kumasi. Tomorrow we head out to sell our machines and then continue onward
to Accra where we will stay until we head back to the States on Saturday.
No comments:
Post a Comment